Perpetuals

I thought this project was quite beautiful: http://storyteller.allesblinkt.com/

It’s a drawing machine that samples from the patent library and best selling books. From the website:

Basic procedure

1. The program downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book.
2. The algorithm eliminates all insignificant words like “I”, “and”, “to”, “for”, “the”, etc. The remaining words and their combinations are the keywords for the patent drawings.
3. Using the keywords in chronological order, it searches for the key-patents.
4. The program now searches for a path connecting the found key patents. This is possible because every patent contains several references to older patents – the so-called “prior art”.
5. All key-patents and the patents connecting them semantically are arranged and printed.
6. Goto step 1.

The result is a sort of infinite illustrated technical manual of technology and literature. I wish they could make a campier version which sampled lyrics from pop songs.

Be sure and watch the video.

Filed under: art, technology

Human Behaviour

Last night, I watched Primer (spoiler alert). It’s a great movie stylishly told (as a result of a low budget) whose main plot twist centers around time travel.

One of the major themes of the movie, in the words of the director: “the deconstruction of a relationship because of the introduction of this [the time machines] power”.

(SPOILER!!!)

The two main characters accidentally discover a time machine. Since the discovery is unexpected, their reactions begin as fairly puerile: how can they make money from time travel? Eventually, they sink into the meat of the story: time travel gives them the ability to rewrite history (history in the sense that events are built up of a series of interpersonal events), not only the lives of others but their own.

(END SPOILER)

I also watched– although it took me a while– Gerald Depardieu’s 400 minute film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. The movie follows the book pretty faithfully, for better or worse. And features the same sort of melodrama that characterized Dumas’ serialized stories– cliff hanger endings, suicides, elopements, weird drugs, etc. I love it… but I suspect not many people could tolerate the tela novella atmosphere of the whole thing.

However, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite books and I’m willing to tolerate just about any version of it. (I’ve got an anime version of the novel from Netflix on its way to my house as I write this.) The book, for those of you who don’t know, is pretty much the mother of all revenge novels, a grand picture painted across exotic locations and lavish settings of the super rich. The major themes are about good and evil and the tension of the Count’s desire for  revenge vs his “true” nature as a good person. This plays out in many small interactions between the Count and people that the audience knows he wishes ill towards. These bits of dramatic irony are the foundation of most of the suspense in the novel.

To put the cherry on top of this smagasborg of everything-I-have-been-reading-wacthing, the last thing I’m currently reading is a book called: The Mathematics of Marriage. From the cover flap:

Divorce rates are at an all-time high. But without a theoretical understanding of the processes related to marital stability and dissolution, it is difficult to design and evaluate new marriage interventions. The Mathematics of Marriage provides the foundation for a scientific theory of marital relations. The book does not rely on metaphors, but develops and applies a mathematical model using difference equations. The work is the fulfillment of the goal to build a mathematical framework for the general system theory of families first suggested by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in the 1960s.

The book also presents a complete introduction to the mathematics involved in theory building and testing, and details the development of experiments and models. In one “marriage experiment,” for example, the authors explored the effects of lowering or raising a couple’s heart rates. Armed with their mathematical model, they were able to do real experiments to determine which processes were affected by their interventions.

Applying ideas such as phase space, null clines, influence functions, inertia, and uninfluenced and influenced stable steady states (attractors), the authors show how other researchers can use the methods to weigh their own data with positive and negative weights. While the focus is on modeling marriage, the techniques can be applied to other types of psychological phenomena as well.

I’ve just read the first couple chapters. (One of which is an introduction to Diff. Equations, sorely needed since I’ve retained nothing from my math courses [Math 23!] as an undergrad.) The central idea of the book is to build a mathematical model that can be used to predict whether or not a given couple will divorce. Of course, in the later chapters, the methodology is extended to predict factors or “treatments” that might prevent divorce between couples. In addition, the later chapters describe how the model might apply to a more general set of relationships between people: any “couple”. Any two people involved in conversation.

This spawned a few ideas in my head.

One: Why can’t I have this model and it’s predictions running real time across all of my conversations? Every conversation could be metric-ed and improved on to facilitate things things like meetings.

Two: Could this software be used to analyze fictional dialogue? (Maybe something Moretti-esque?) Or maybe it could have a more significant impact on the creative process of writing dialog?

Filed under: art, technology

Lost in Translation

MonaTweeta II, originally uploaded by Quasimondo.

Skitch delicioused me this project, which I think is pretty cool. Basically, the challenge was to compress an image into a 140 tweet. The image description describes the process in more detail:

Preliminary result of a little competition with the goal to write an image encoder/decoder that allows to send an image in a tweet. The image on the left is what I currently manage to send in 140 characters via twitter.

This is the tweet for the image:
圑嘌婂搒孵怤實恄幖戰怴搝愩娻屗奊唀唭嚟帧啜徠山峔巰喜圂嗊埯廇嗕患嚵幇墥彫壛嶂壋悟声喿墰廚埽崙嫖嘵奰恛嬂啷婕媸姴嚥娐嗪嫤圣峈嬻尤囮愰啴屽嶍屽嶰寂喿 嶐唥帑尸庠啞彐啯廂喪帄嗆怠嗙开唅恰唦慼啥憛幮悐喆悠喚忐嗳惐唔戠啹媊婼捐啸抃岖嗅怲幀嗈拀唹坭嵄彠喺悠單囏庰抂唋岰媮岬夣宐彋媀恦啼彐壔姩宔嬀

I am using chinese characters here since in UTF-8 encoding they allow me to send 210 bytes of data in 140 chars. In theory I could use the whole character code range from 0×0000-0xffff, but there are several control chars among them which probably could not be sent properly. With some tweaking and testing it would be possible to use at least 1 or 2 more bits which would allow to sneak 17 or 35 more bytes into a tweet, but the whole encoding would be way more nasty and the tweets would contain chars that have no font representation.

Besides this char hack there are a few other tricks at work in the encoding. I will reveal them over time. For now I just mention the difficulties involved here:

A typical RGB color needs 24 bits which is 3 bytes. This means if you just stored raw colors you could send 70 colors. Unfortunately you couldn’t send anything else. At least that would allow you to send a 7×10 pixel matrix.

The worst way to store one full x/y coordinate would be 2 times 4 bytes, which is 26 coordinates in one tweet. That’s 8 triangles. Obviously you have to do some concessions with the precision here. 2 bytes per number maybe? Gives you 52 points or 17 triangles. Unfortunately those come without color info.

What I like about this project, other than the fact that you can send an image (albeit a pretty lo-res one) via twitter, is the unintentional text that’s generated from the compression. In this case the compression has to stay in the realm of text and therefore is still “readable”. In the comments for the image, one fan of this project has translated the Chinese characters that encode the mona lisa:

The whip is war
that easily comes
framing a wild mountain.

Hello, you in the closet,
singing–posing carved peaks
of sound understanding.

Upon a kitchen altar
visit a prostitute–
an ugly woman saint–
who decoys.

Particularly
lonesome mountain valley,
your treasury: a dumb corpse and
funeral car, idle choke open.

Reclassification:
exactly what you would call nervous.
Well, do not suggest recalcitrance
those who donated sad.

The smell of a rugged frame
strikes cement block once.

Where you?a
Cape. Cylinder. Cry.

It’s nice to see digital art that has multiple readings which are dependent on the medium itself. We still use the words “images” and “text” when we’re talking about the digital analogs of real world media.

But maybe they are qualitatively different?

Filed under: art, programming, projects, technology

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

As part of my hiring package at Microsoft, I got a very modest stock award. Those of you who know me also know that I have never owned any stocks in my life and also usually don’t have any savings.

However, these are tough economic times and I’d at least like to keep track of how the stock I have (it’s not much and it’s all in one company) is doing. I’d also like to keep track of it with a daily reminder, a daily notice that fits in with my other daily activities. For me this means twitter.

What I want is something pretty simple. A twitter account that I can follow that will update me on Microsoft’s stock price daily. Now there are a number of twitter stockbots out there. Generally, however, you have to ask them for a stock quote. (Which defeats the whole push model of twitter to begin with) After searching for 5 minutes on the internet and not finding a solution, I decided to build my own.

I took an rss feed from QuoteRSS.com and then used TwitterFeed.com to tweet it to a new Twitter account. I think it’s all working, and it literally took about 10 minutes from start to finish. The only annoying part was having to create a new twitter account; this seems really dumb.

In the same way that I can build and manage my RSS feeds, I’d really really like be able to create virtual twitter accounts. Twitter isn’t just about looking at other news sources or information outside of myself. Twitter should be able to deliver stuff that I can curate.

I need a Yahoo Pipes for Twitter.

Filed under: personal, programming, projects, technology

Props

I uploaded a few of the rough renders I did for the props I designed for the Productivity Vision Video. I modeled them all in Rhino, rendered in Max. And then had them milled out of acrylic at a local shop out here.

This is the clear desk monitor that one of the office workers uses:

A keyboard/slate device:

More here.

There’s a pen and the cell phone (which has some detail) on a harddrive that just crashed. Once I can recover it, I’ll post those too.

I also loaded a hi-res version of the video to YouTube.

Filed under: architecture, technology, work

Really Simple

A few days ago, I gave a little presentation at work on how I use my RSS feeds. Most of it was stuff I’ve learned from T-Bone. Today, T shot me a tweet asking if I had written any of it down. Which I had not. So I thought I’d try.

First, most of this is going to be old hat for people who read this blog. Most of you probably have better solutions that me or are using software that I’m still late-to-the-party for. Anyway, here goes:

Several years ago, I was completely ignorant of RSS and readers. I had sites– blogs, news sites, social networking sites (Friendster!), etc. that I was interested in. Many, I would check daily for new updates. Then T introduced me to Google Reader, an RSS feed reader. With a feed reader (there are many out there– I use feedly these days), I read updates to websites as if they were emails in an inbox. This means I can check all those sites in one place and only when there’s new stuff! (Switching browsing modes to a push-pull strategy).

But RSS isn’t just the content of blogs. All manner of things come in the RSS flavor. For example, any search in Craigslist (and Ebay too, although it’s harder to find) can be saved out as a feed. This is how I found my apartment here in Seattle. I went to Craigslist, searched for Fremont / apartments  / 1+ Bedrooms / price range / dogs and stored the resulting RSS in my reader. Whenever a new listing appeared, it showed up directly in my reader, I didn’t have to check Craiglist. I stored several searches in different neighborhoods and called them as soon as listings came up. I got the house I’m renting now, because I “was the first to call”.

I still use this technique for shopping. I’ll create some search feeds on Ebay and Amazon of stuff I want at a price I want, if there’s a hit, I see it in my feed reader. Easy! And you can do it with jobs, services, and *ahem* dates, if you’re into that.

Another type of site that offers feeds that I keep track of are social networking sites. I’m not a huge fan of facebook, but I do like the updates. So I grab the updates as a feed. For my closer friends, I track their twitter updates, flickr photos, delicious links, locations (with dopplr), etc etc. Delicious is a nice site because, like Craigslist, every page has a feed. You can follow tags, people, people networks– combinations of those. Using a feed reader, I can finally unify the content that all these disparate social networks are supposed to connect me to anyway. I can also know if someone sends me a link in delicious or comments on my photos… those are feeds too. Now I don’t actually have to go to the site to know what’s happening, all that information comes to me.

But what if you want something different than what a given feed can offer? Say you like Slashdot, but the feed has a ton of posts that you’re never going to read. It would be great if you could filter them. Luckily you can use something like Yahoo Pipes or MS Popfly. These web services take RSS (and things that aren’t RSS, but can be converted) and let you use a graphical programming language to manipulate a data stream into an RSS feed that you can be happy with. (T has a great little tutorial on Pipes.)

The last thing I do with feeds is package up my own. I use Swurl, which isn’t great, but it does the trick. Now I’ve got a feed with my blog posts, tweets, delicious links, netflix queue etc– basically everything I’m spamming out on to the interwebs. I put that feed back into my reader. Now when I want to search for something I’ve forgotten or should know, I search my reader instead of a Search Engine or Delicious. My reader has all of my stuff and all the stuff of the people and places that I care about.

These days I’m trying to do some of the same sort of things– taking streams and modifying them– with Twitter’s version of a reader: TweetDeck. The flow is surprisingly similar in places. We’ll see how it turns out…

Filed under: culture, programming, technology, web, work

Phone book

Recently, my cell phone (a Razr) mysteriously broke in half and I was forced to buy a new one. I’ve been tempted by the mobile lifestyle, thanks to some friends (Skitch and Tom P.) who make it look effortless… They also use iPhones. Which, it seems, everybody is buying. (iPhone rules everything around me.)

The iPhone is really really awesome and I’m certainly not immune to its siren song. But, as I shopped around for phones, looking at the google phone and the new blackberry touch carefully, there was something about these iphone clone wars which didn’t quite fit what I was imagining I’d do with it.

It would be Half Kindle/Half iPhone. A thin phone with a easy to read screen that I have to charge every few weeks (if ever).  I wouldn’t care so much if it’s black and white and not color. There’s some concept designs for eink phones out there. But they aren’t thin enough.

Here’s how thin (and flexible) the eink display in Esquire Magazine is. (I dissected an issue a few weeks ago…):

If you can stick a GPS in there I’d be happy. I might use my phone for wayfinding. But not a deal breaker.

No video. Limited harddrive space. Some touch. Multitouch would be nice, but not required. No animations. No web browser although I could still download emails, my feeds, and e-books/pdf (like the kindle) to browse semi-offline. Mostly, it’s just a “phone book”.

I don’t want to be “too connected” or distracted. I think other people feel this way too. I want to be just connected enough to do the reading that I have a hard time doing when my laptop (with wifi)  is in front of me.

Filed under: personal, technology

I was bored under unusual circumstances.

Watched Benjamin Button on opening night the day after my birthday, the birthday of that other guy.

Thanks to some auspicious timing (I’m thinking about getting old too!), a cool trailer, and my respect for David Fincher, my hopes were high. It was good movie: beautifully shot, surprisingly dark in places– but, goddamnit, it wasn’t awesome. Fincher/Gump has been a criticism that’s been about right, but Benjamin (the character) isn’t a simpleton and isn’t exactly nice, conflicts that weren’t explored. I wish the movie were meaner, more Seven.

From SFF Portal

Although it’s sort of refreshing to see movies tackling death head on, I’d say Kaufman does it better than Fincher. These movies will always be a little unsatisfying because no one is going to solve anything. But Synecdoche, similar to its lesser cousins (like the Matrix or Dark City), play uncertainty into surrealism and the ending, imho, works about as well as it can.

Anyway, the holidays were awesome! I spent most my time playing Settlers with my borther and sister who were visiting. At one point, my brother joked that he had finally made it onto youtube. I went looking for the video in question by searching for “Snavely” in youtube. I found something curious.

In search results are videos that aren’t tagged with “snavely”, don’t have “snavely” in the descriptions, and aren’t stored in any Snavely family collections. Why are they there? They’re all the youtube videos I’ve saved to delicious.

Yet another thorn-in-the-side reminder that everyone can mine my data, but me.

Filed under: movies, technology

Auto Raves

Wikipedia: Cover of Gibson's Neuromancer

In a recent conversation, Johnny Lee mentioned (and I think he was referring to Desnee Tan’s work) that sensors could be all over the place and still not give us all the information we need. For example, we could have a camera in our car but it might be hard to recognize with computer vision an “accident” ahead. But if we placed sensors on someone’s body we might be able to record their heartrate or adrenaline as they “sensed” the accident ahead. We could sense of lot of information through the body.

The first thing I thought of in the back of my mind was Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Billed “Artificial Artifical Intelligence”, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk basically provides an interface and market for people to divide computationally complex tasks into small Human Intelligence Tasks. For example, if you come up with a question that fits a given statement, you’ll get $0.03.  Spammers have used this service to bypass the “test” to see you’re a real person on blogs and forums.

But one big problem with Turk is that the HIT’s generally require conscious effort, which is slow and time-consuming for both Workers and Requestors…  I think you see where I’m going here.

People hooked up to sensors could “automatically” be turked, selling data gathered subconsciously (thanks for the link T). For example, I want to do a quick test of a new ad campaign. I flash the ad up to some Workers. They just look at it for a second. I gather bio-feedback. And we’re done! They get some pennies in their accounts. I get results instantaneously.

The whole thing feels sorta Neuromancer-like, which means it’s probably going to happen.

Filed under: books, culture, programming, technology

The 4 R’s: Search

Total Recall

So T delicioused me this article. It is thought provoking. And since delicious doesn’t allow for multiple comments or conversations, I’ll just have to discuss it here. This is going to continue an earlier post series.

We’ll try to concentrate searching and remembering, two tasks that we do all the time, offline and away from computers. But first I want to clarify a few things brought up in the article.

So here’s Philipp Keller’s primary polemic:

One common task while browsing the web is making sure you will be able to recall a valuable information you are just looking at. This article aims to prove that social bookmarking as in delicious, simpy, magnolia et al. is the wrong tool for that task.

I’m in “total” agreement. If you’re using delicious as your main tool for recall, you’re probably using the wrong tool. That said, is Keller seriously using delicious to remember stuff? He thinks delicious is the right tool for “Sharing Links” and Using “bookmarks to get things done”, but poor for remembering. Are those first two things really less important than recall?

Until I started using twitter, and the “share” option in my feed reader, my delicious feed was basically my micro-blog. I delicious stuff all the time with no clear intention of returning to it. Shit, I’ll delicious a link that I know someone else might be interested in just to have a conversation with them about it, even if I’ve never actually read anything on that link. (I may not have read Moby Dick, but I sure as hell delicioused it.)

Delicious is “social-bookmarking” or alternatively “url lifecasting” and as I’ve mentioned before it’s real power is in conversation and narrative. Delicious needs to buttress up these areas quickly or I’m going to export all my links to somewhere else and stream from there. Two features in particular drive me nutty:

1.) Why can’t I respond to someone’s description of a link? To have a conversation around a link that someone sent to me, I have to send it back with another “for:” attached.

2.) Why doesn’t a delicious post have a unique url? (This is such a pain in the butthole.) Then at least I could generate a twitter feed of all of my delicious posts or something like Feynman’s Turtles, delicious all the way down.

Granted, delicious also has poor tagging and search mechanisms. But even if these features somehow appeared in the next version of delicious, I wouldn’t think that it’s suddenly a memory aid. Why? Because I don’t want to “remember” by URL. Social bookmarking is great, but it’s not a perfect tool for “memory augmentation”. All it remembers are URL’s and tags; two fairly abstract methods of notation and organization. These only cover a small part of the things and methods by which I remember.

When you’re asked to search for the answer to a question, the question itself might fall into a range of categories. One extreme of that range is that the question is completely random, like trivia… like “who wrote ‘Fermata‘”, for example? Offline you’d probably go to a dictionary or encyclopedia. Online you’d probably go to your search engine of choice. This isn’t the same as remembering because you never knew the answer in the first place.

The other extreme is that you already know you’ve seen the answer, you just can’t remember where or how. The answer is buried somewhere in your collected detritus of bookmarks, files, emails, pdfs, or whatever. I would like to search my own stuff.

The category right in the middle is where I don’t know the answer, but I’m pretty sure my friends do, so I’d like to search through their stuff. Of course, these all exist on a range, so sometimes I might want to search a particular friend and their social network, etc. The closest thing I have to this is when feedly (which I like, but is still a seriously buggy work in progress) will show my feed reader matches for any google search that I do. I wish the delicious plugin did the same. But again, a search engine search doesn’t look at my “local” files, emails, or documents and when I need to remember something, it seems silly that I also have to remember the format of the content as well.

A tough recall scenario will go something like this. I need the answer that was a result of a conversation I had over the phone, that continued in twitter, that spanned a couple blog posts, that was mentioned obliquely in the description of a delicious url someone sent to me, that I annottated onto a pdf doc. These are remembered piecemeal, of course, which means I repeat a search for each bucket.

Keller thinks that one reason for the problem is because delicious tears links from context of the original page. This is 50% true. Contextual search/recall is what we need but the context isn’t just the page. The context is the series of thoughts and conversations that led me to the content, and also, where I think they fit in to what I already know. Why isn’t my all my data organized according to conversations or topics that I’m interested in? If it were, then I could grab things with even “less” context. For example, Internet Explorer webslices let me grab just a piece of a page. Sadly, MS tied these awkwardly to IE bookmarks. (I hope they get it right soon…those need to be feeds. Great idea, we hardly knew ye.) I would like to be able to grab slices of conversations, slices of videos, a piece of a song, or a section of a diagram. These snippets could be mashed-up into some other thoughts that might have little to do with their origin.

So what’s missing here? Well, I need a personal database or personal file system. (Live Mesh is an interesting start to the very basics of a personal file system. So far, I like it.) Then I can pipe all the pieces of my life stream (delicious, flickr, blogs, reader stats etc) as well as all of my emails and documents and conversations into a place where things I “know” are at hand and accessible. Then I can finally mine my own data. Which will allow for me to organize what I’ve seen but haven’t learned; an infinite stream of procrastination, ty CS18 & Professor Donald. Some of those promises I’ll make good on; others I never will. So having thousands of delicious links with no tags is fine. Not reading them is awesome. (Right now, I’ll usually only return to the most recent few hundred to find things anyway.) At the very least this personal data/file system lets me view my content in flows which match my life: a twitter comment sparked a delicious link sparked a blog post which was a conversation that I wrote a research paper about.

Anyway, there’s a lot more here to talk about. I can’t help but think of this recent obituary in the NY Times.

Filed under: technology, work